Carolee Hazard's once-modest goals have ballooned into something much bigger since a random act of kindness over a lost wallet in a Peninsula grocery store.

The 43-year-old Menlo Park woman wants to ramp up the initial $93 donation she sent to Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties this summer and enlist others to help her raise $93,000 by Dec. 31.

The volunteer effort has become almost a part-time job, and Hazard's been making use of social media as well as traditional news coverage to get the word out.

"This is more than a fundraising thing," Hazard said. "If people choose the food bank, then fantastic. But the heart of this is about setting a wonderful, inspirational example for people who just want to be part of something good.''

Hazard's life has taken a dramatic turn since she unwittingly sparked an Internet-spurred pay-it-forward movement.

In fact, her generosity catapulted her onto television and even got her invited this month to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's San Francisco home, where she found herself noshing on ahi sashimi and scallop seviche, being encouraged to help out Silicon Valley's hungry to an even greater extent.

"It's exciting and a little overwhelming," Hazard said. "It feels empowering to be able to make a difference and, quite honestly, quite scary at times."

The story of how Hazard launched a Facebook-driven food bank fundraiser began Aug. 11.

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Hazard and her two daughters were standing in line at Trader Joe's in Menlo Park behind Jenni Ware, 45, of Redwood City, who had lost her wallet and had a cart full of groceries for which she couldn't pay. Hazard stepped up and paid the stranger's $207.29 bill. The women exchanged information, and Ware promised to pay Hazard back. Hazard, a retired Genentech biochemist, went home and posted on her Facebook page that she was flip-flopping about feeling very good about her actions and "very, very stupid."

Later that day, Ware, a hypnotherapist, found her wallet and sent her grocery store good Samaritan a check for $300. Thankful, Hazard again went back to her Facebook community. What should she do with the extra $93? Most everyone responded: Give it to charity.

Hazard chose Second Harvest, which distributed 35 million pounds of food in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in 2008. This year, the food bank projects it will distribute 45 million pounds. The food bank's annual fundraising yields about $20 million.

Hazard's story, first reported in the Mercury News, has since resounded throughout the world. Children who live in her neighborhood donated 93 cents. A single mom in Arizona heard about it and gave $9.30. People in Afghanistan and England have become part of the 93 Dollar Club on Facebook, which has grown to 630 members. ABC7's Cheryl Jennings picked up the story for her "Beyond the Headlines" show, as did KFOG radio. San Francisco-based Storytellers for Good did a minidocumentary on it.

"I liked how this simple act can inspire people from all over the world," said videographer Cara Jones, who will air Hazard's story on her storytelling Web site in December.

Hazard has been tracking and gently supervising the mushrooming phenomenon.

She estimates she puts in at least 15 to 20 hours a week answering e-mails, working with an online clothing boutique, Muito Fina at muitofina.com, that wants to donate 5 percent of its December sales to the food bank, doing interviews and uploading photos for the "Yahoo! You In?" campaign, which turned to Hazard's example and asked its supporters to do "random acts of kindness."

All that is in addition to volunteering at her daughters' elementary school, tutoring kids and setting up the science fair, among other projects.

But it wasn't until Hazard attended Ellison's party earlier this month with her husband, Jon, a Google senior manager of engineering operations, that she realized she wanted to do more. Her efforts so far have raised $24,000 to feed Silicon Valley's hungry, but she said that isn't enough.

"I was just blown away by the immense need to feed people in the Bay Area," Hazard said. "I turned to my husband and just said, 'You know, we just need to aim high. We have a truly enormous task at hand.' "

Her idea came as a direct result of listening to the hunger statistics provided at Ellison's party by S. Andrew Starbird, a former member of the food bank board and interim dean of the business school at Santa Clara University. Basing his statistics on a variety of sources, including the 2008 numbers from the U.S. departments of Agriculture and Labor, Starbird spoke of the roughly 210 million meals, worth about $400 million, that are still needed to fill the hunger need in the South Bay and Peninsula. He said that while that number might seem daunting, people can still do something about it.

And he was glad to hear that Hazard was inspired to do something.

"Isn't she something?" Starbird said of Hazard. "She sets a fine example for all of us. She represents the very best of people in Silicon Valley."